Review: A Dark, Haunting Work by Michael Hersch Gets a Premiere

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“A Breath Upwards,” a new composition by Michael Hersch, in its New York premiere on Friday night, with, from left, Ah Young Hong, soprano; Jamie Hersch, horn; Miranda Cuckson, violin/viola; and Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet, at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.CreditCreditRichard Perry/The New York Times

By Vivien Schweitzer

June 12, 2016

Dante’s “Inferno” might seem an unlikely inspiration for an artist trying to escape illness and loss. But the composer Michael Hersch saw hell as a point of departure when writing “a breath upwards,” which received its New York premiere at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan on Friday evening, presented by Lex54 Concerts.

This stately, slow-moving song cycle, inspired by the etchings of the artist Michael Mazur, proved as dark and unsettling as earlier works by Mr. Hersch, who is often propelled by grim subject matter and has said that composing is a way to channel his anxiety.

His music is notable for its startling contrasts, with hauntingly beautiful interludes juxtaposed with dissonant outbursts and interwoven with solitary passages tinged with a Renaissance-flavored melancholy. Mr. Hersch’s monodrama “On the Threshold of Winter” (2014) was inspired by his own struggle with cancer, the death of a close friend and texts by Marin Sorescu, a Romanian poet who died of liver cancer.

The soprano Ah Young Hong, a frequent collaborator, delivered the eerie texts of “a breath upward” with expressive intensity, although she sometimes had to sing in such a high range that the text wasn’t audible. The vocal line unfolded over the jagged, spare and haunting textures of viola (Miranda Cuckson), clarinet (Gleb Kanasevich) and horn (Jamie Hersch).

Claustrophobic harmonies underpinned with sparse insistence the line: “So we had to go on the open edge/one at a time.” Wordless interludes illustrated verses by Ezra Pound, a flicker of a chorale evoking the text from his “Cantos:” “Borne into the tempest, black cloud wrapping their wings.” Clarinet, horn and viola fragments grew increasingly agitated in another of Dante’s texts, culminating in a dense outburst for the soprano’s apocalyptic declamation of “Now you can understand.”

Both works on the first half of the program seemed apt pairings for Mr. Hersch’s piece. Ms. Hong vividly conveyed the contrasting moods of selections from Kurtag’s “Kafka Fragments” — expressionistic settings of German texts from Kafka’s letters and diaries. She shaded her voice with myriad hues: lovely and clear in “The Good March in Step” and grittier in the zigzag vocal line of “Hiding Places.” The eclectic moods and textures are mirrored in the accompanying violin part, brilliantly rendered by Ms. Cuckson.

Ms. Hong also sang with expressive fervor in Milton Babbitt’s “Philomel,” a dramatic monologue based on Ovid’s myth of Philomena. Synthesized sounds blended evocatively with a live and recorded soprano in this startling work, the intensity heightened by the surround-sound effect from multiple speakers.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Dark and Haunting Work by Way of Dante. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe